It is useful to analyze the thermal characteristics of an object by creating a thermal model of the object and analyzing the model. A thermal model of an object is a model that represents the heat conduction characteristics of the material of which the object is composed.
Thermal analysis systems that analyze the thermal characteristics of a thermal model of an object are used in the design and manufacture of integrated circuit packages. Higher concentrations of components in integrated circuits and faster clock speeds have resulted in higher power consumption across a broad range of integrated circuit products. It is important that an integrated circuit package exhibit thermal performance capable of managing the thermal heat generated by the integrated circuit. To design packages more efficiently, thermal analysis systems are used to predict the thermal characteristics of a particular integrated circuit package design.
An analysis of a thermal model can be a steady state or a transient analysis. A steady state analysis of a thermal model produces a result that predicts the temperature to which the thermal model would settle given infinite power on time. A transient analysis of a thermal model begins with a specific temperature for the thermal model and predicts the temperature of the thermal model after a specified time period.
One type of thermal model of an object is a resistor network thermal model. A resistor network thermal model represents an object as a number of nodes separated by a number of resistors. The object to be modeled is divided into a number of elemental volumes often chosen to be cubes. Each node in the resistor network thermal model is centered in one of the elemental volumes subdividing the object. The resistors connecting the nodes represent the heat conduction characteristics of the physical material between each node. The resistors represent the total thermal conduction between nodes including convection boundaries, internal conduction, and radiation. A resistor network thermal model is useful for calculating a numerical solution that takes into account property variations in the materials from which the modeled object is composed. A resistor network thermal model is particularly useful for numerical solution of complicated three dimensional models. A network thermal model can also be considered a conduction node thermal model when the conductances are specified rather than resistances.